Free and easy
Jun Geng
China.  2017.  90 min.
Cast:   Xu Gang , Zhang Zhiyong

This film by chinese director Geng Jun is a sneaky and funny look at petty criminals in a small town in northern China. An old industrial city in northwest China, now deserted and covered in snow, is the picturesque backdrop of this absurd history. A soap seller arrives there, a crime happens, and from that moment on, they begin to appear absurd and strange characters who face each other with tragicomic results. Geng Jun shows an impressive domain of the formal elements of cinema and a talent for dealing with social problems from a hilarious point of view even though the underlying theme can be quite serious.

JUN  GENG

Born in 1976, is a Chinese independent filmmaker. His films have shown at festivals in China and internationally, such as Youth, which was entered at the 2009 Rome Film Festival, The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping (2016 Tromsø International Film Festival), and Free and Easy, which was entered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Geng Jung is an expert in using of offscreen space and has a predilection for symmetrical compositions. Artistic voices in China are subjected to horrendous amounts of government pressure and influence. At times this can be overwhelming to artists in China. As a result, political and social commentary must be expertly encrypted into the fabric of Chinese art. Nothing can be said directly and what may seem to be a somewhat random film about con-men in an impoverished city is, at its heart, an eloquent and important film. It is a silent scream for revolution and change set against the beautiful cinematic landscape of China.

According to her
Estelle Artus
U.S.A.  2016.  90 min.
Cast:   Irina Abraham, Pascal Yen-Pfister, Pascal Escriout

Just before reaching the summit of glory, Veronica happily leaves her career as a pianist to take care of her son. Despite the pressure of her husband Paul, a French stockbroker, he sets aside the concerts to devote himself completely to his mothering facet. However, without a salary or independence job, Veronica is becoming more dependent on her husband and then arises a feeling of personal dislocation. After meeting Amanda, a promising and seductive young pianist attracted by Paul, he rethought the idea of returning to the stage. The harmony between love, motherhood and musical career seems to be impossible in this obscure account of a young russian woman trying to keep the balance between rich french expatriates in New York.

ESTELLE  ARTUS

Estelle Artus is a French born film director and screenwriter living in New York. She graduated with a PhD from Sorbonne University in Paris where she taught visual arts as Associate Professor. In Paris, Estelle won acclaim for her short films: “Domestic Underground”, “Ring Road”, “I love Korea and Korea loves me”, “Play Again” and “Where it Clicks”. In 2007 Estelle moved to New York and worked for the museum of modern art (MOMA). In 2016 Estelle co-produced and directed her debut feature:  According to Her, which premiered at Cinequest Film Festival. She has been nominated for the NBC Universal Emerging Director Program the same year.

Cold of Kalandar
Mustafa Kara
Turkey.  2016.  130 min.
Cast :   Haydar Sisman, Nuray Yesilaraz, Hanife Kara.

The film is a rural drama about the struggle of a Turkish family against adversity. Mehmet lives with his wife, mother-in-law and children (one of them with disabilities) in a rickety hut in the mountains. Once found some gold stones in the back of the mountains and from then he wanders in the hope of finding again and carrying a nearby mining and thus be able to get his family out of misery. Meanwhile, the time is passing without obtaining results for the despair of his wife. The film was filmed during four seasons, and these are the ones that determine the rhythm and the mood of the protagonists. We could say that it is the struggle of the human against nature.

MUSTAFA  KARA

Mustafa Kara, was born in 1982 and graduated from the Department of Radio and Television at Cumhuriyet University. His debut was with HOPE ISLAND (2007), which was a co-production between Turkey and the UK. In 2009 he founded Karafilm Production with Nermin Aytekin. Kalandar’s Cold (2015) is his second feature, fruit of years of work in many other documentary films and commercials.

Director’s note
“Cold of Kalandar” arises from a “narrative passion”, tells a story away from the artificiality in a sincere, realistic and consistent way. Our main goal is to show small dramas, ordinary stories, family and neighborhood relationships, relationships between nature, animals and humans in a remote mountain village and the interior of the Black Sea region to make modern man feel the meaning of these relationships staying in reality while using the technical and aesthetic potential of the film is an outstanding feature of this film.

The Levelling
Hope Dickson Leach
Great Britain. 2016. 83 min.
Cast:   Ellie Kendrick, David Troughton, Jack Holden

A sober family drama about an unexpected suicide is framed against the devastating Somerset floods. Clover (Ellie Kendrick), the film’s clearheaded young protagonist, comes home to Somerset after learning that her younger brother Harry has killed himself. There she is met by her sullen father, Aubrey (David Troughton), a rude man whose past woes have derailed his life. Quiet and dour, unable to express himself, he finds himself trapped in quiet anger. Recent floods have rendered the main house uninhabitable, and Aubrey lives in a trailer. It is not long before the simmering emotions between father and daughter break out into undisguised war. Clover instinctively blames Aubrey for the death of her brother and is determined to get to the truth.

Hope Dickson Leach

Hope completed her MFA in filmmaking at Columbia University where she made three short films that played at festivals worldwide. While in New York she was assistant to Todd Solondz on his film PALINDROMES. Hope’s award-winning thesis film, THE DAWN CHORUS, was selected for Sundance, Edinburgh, London and many other festivals. Screen International made her a Star of Tomorrow and Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the ’25 New Faces of Independent Film’. Since her return to the UK, she has made further acclaimed short works for Channel 4, Film London, the UK Film Council and the National Theatre of Scotland. Her debut feature THE LEVELLING, produced by Wellington Films as part the iFeatures scheme (funded by BBC Films, the BFI and Creative England) had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2016. At the London Film Festival she was awarded the inaugural IWC Filmmaker Bursary Award in Association with the BFI. She is currently developing several features and is a co-founder of Raising Films – a campaign to make the film industry more parent-friendly. She lives in Scotland with her husband and two sons.

Daguerreotype
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japan. 2016. 131 min.
Cast :   Tahar Rahim, Constance Rousseau, Olivier Gourmet

Daguerreotype,  is the story of the assistant to a daguerreotype photographer who falls in love with the photographer’s daughter and how the relationship reflects the combination of love and pain in the form of art.
Stephane, the photographer, lives and works in a beautiful old mansion on the outskirts of Paris with his 22-years-old daughter, Marie, a blonde girl from another world who reminds Stephane of his wife’s dead and melancholy past. Marie poses for daguerreotypes, which often require hours of immobility. The arrival of Jean, the assistant, supposes a breath of fresh air in the life of Marie and soon the attraction between the two appears, giving rise to a thorny conflict. Although the film is set in the present, everything bears an imprint of the past.

KIYOSHI KUROSAWA

Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa. After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guidance of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza films.

In the early 1990s, Kurosawa won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.
Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his 1997 crime thriller film Cure. Also that year, he experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child’s murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.
Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999 with Charisma, a detective film starring Koji Yakusho.  In 2000, Seance, Kurosawa’s adaptation of the novel Seance on a Wet Afternoon by Mark McShane, premiered on Kansai TV. It also starred Yakusho, as well as Jun Fubuki (the two had appeared together in Charisma as well). In 2001, he directed the horror film Pulse. Kurosawa released Bright Future, starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, in 2003. He followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.

Films selected at Imagineindia 2017

ELIPPATHAYAM
KATHAPURUSHAN
KODIYETTAM
MATHILUKAL
MUKHAMUKHAM
VIDHEYAN
NIZHALKUTHU
FOUR WOMEN

KALO POTHI, Dir. Min Bahadur Bham | Nepal | 2015 | 90’
We are in the year 2001, a temporary ceasefire brings a much-needed break to a small war-torn village in Northern Nepal, bringing much joy among the residents. Prakash and Kiran, two young close friends, are also starting to feel the change in the air. Though they are divided by caste and social creed, they remain inseparable, and start raising a hen given to Prakash by his sister, with hopes to save money by selling her eggs. However, the hen goes missing. To find it, they embark on a journey, innocently unaware of the tyranny brought by the fragile ceasefire. Continue reading Kalo Pothi (Min Bahadur Bham) in Barcelona →

FIG FRUIT AND THE WASPS, Dir. M. S. Prakash Babu | India | 2014 | 90’
Gouri, a documentary filmmaker takes a journey along with her friend. She is trying to collect material for her documentary project on instrumental music. They go to a village with the help of a schoolteacher. They travel to meet an instrumental musician, who has gone some place elsewhere to give a performance. Both are forced to stay in the village till the musician returns. Film tries to capture the human attitude when they are placed in a condition/situation/environment which is familiar and at the same time unfamiliar. As the seemingly simple yet complex situations develop, how these characters fits in to a landscape and climate as much mental as physical. Some time “vision” isn’t what is visible, sound isn’t exactly what is heard. Continue reading FIG FRUIT AND THE WASPS (M. S. Prakash Babu) In Barcelona →

THE LAST SMILE, Dir. Shankey Srinivasan | India | 2016 | 87’
Inspired by true events, this film chronicles the struggles of an Indian-American immigrant in the San Francisco bay area, who must overcome his grief, and with the help of a private detective, fight against a multi-billion dollar diet supplement company that is responsible for the untimely death of his adult son. Continue reading The last smile (Shankey Srinivasan) in Barcelona →